Short description : A monophonic Synthesizer. The Mini Moog is the best selling Analog keyboard of all time. It was also the first synthesizer that was actually portable and easy to use. It is very hard to imagine what the keyboard industry would have been without this classic piece of equipment.

Approximate number made : 12 000

Production period : 1970 - 1982

Keys : 44

Used by : The Chemical Brothers, The Orb, Kraftwerk, Jan Hammer, Nine Inch Nails, Vince Clarke, Gary Numan, Add N To (X), Rick Wakeman, 808 State, Air, Future Sound of London, Bushflange, Chick Corea, Uberzone, Depeche Mode, Recoil, Tangerine Dream, Mouse on Mars, Apollo 440, Dave Holmes, Jean-Michel Jarre, George Duke, Blondie, Rush, Keith Emerson, Josef Zawinul, the Chemical Brothers and Herbie Hancock….and just about everyone.

History : The Minimoog was the brain child of engineer Bob Moog. He had started out in the early 50´s putting together Theremin kits selling them to friends. He also wrote articles about the technology used in small technical papers. After a while he started tinkering around with the whole concept of working with stable pitched oscillators and that soundsignal. The first Moog keyboard was made in 1964 for musician Herbert Deutsch. Soon he was putting together so called modular keyboards were one could choose for yourself how your keyboard should be routed. This was achieved by putting different filters, ring modulators and other components into a cabinet. Then the user would route his soundsignal however he or she wanted creating an almost limitless array of sounds. The problem with this was that the systems were big and bulky and it was complicated and tedious to connect everything so that you would get the sound you were after. The main market were universities and sound laboratories. The breakthrough came with an album by Walter Carlos. It was called switched on Bach and consisted of Bach pieces played on a Modular Moog. Remember this was done with a monophonic keyboard ( which means that you can only play one note at a time, no chords ) It was an incredible achievement and it came to be the best selling classical album of 1968. What it meant for Bob Moog and associates was that a Moog keyboard was the absoulte hippest thing to own and use. The company got completely swamped with orders.

In 1969 Bob Moog started working on a portable version on his Modular systems. He would take kind of a best-of attitude in his choices. The most popular features of the Modular systems should be put together in a small convenient package. 1970 the first Mini Moog rolled of the production line. The start wasn´t easy though....It was difficult to persuade music stores and retailers to buy into a completely new and different instrument. One should realize that this was in the time of organs and electric pianos. The Mini Moog bore very little resemblance to either. Enter Dave Van Koevering.
Dave van Koeverings mission was to break the instrument into the marketplace. The story goes that he had travelled all over the country with two or three Minimoogs trying to sell them directly to the shops with nu success at all. So what he did was that he went to see a band at a holiday inn and in the intermission he called over the keyboardplayer and gave him a short demonstration of the synth. He was overwhelmed and wanted buy one straight away. So Van Koevering and the musician went to one of the music stores that had rejected the Mini Moog and walked in with two of them. He told the clerk that he had a buyer for a MiniMoog and he had brought an extra so that they would have one in stock. According to the myth, that is how the first Mini Moog was sold.

Dave van Koevering went on to greater things a couple of years later and created one of my favourite instruments....The Orchestron.

For more information about the history of the Moog company and the keyboards they made. Please check out the www.moogarchives.com A truly inspirational and interesting site. A lot of great pictures.

The Mini Moog at Roth Händle : I bought my Mini Moog from one of swedish artist Orups old keyboard players and for a long time it just collected dust. I don´t think he´d used it all that much either. I think of my big issues with the Mini Moog was that you when you were tweaking you´d always find " that " signature sound. Jan Hammer, Keith Emerson whatever. Which to me made it less interesting than the MS-10 or the Mono Poly. But these last couple of years have actually changed that a lot due to the fact that I have discovered a lot of weird quirks with my Mini. I have the old oscillators in mine and they turn to wobble, detune and do all sorts of weird stuff….which is great. On the Kit le Fever recordings we distorted it to smithereens with a Nobles bass distortion and detuned the oscillators as we were playing it which gave it a more industrial feel. When it comes the " phat " moog bass I tend to use the Taurus pedals because it feels like they are more musical frequency wise. On the Mini Moog you can get impossibly deep basses that are probably amazing for ambient/techno-skiddeliboom music but when I am recording with pop bands I very seldom have any use for those sounds.

The latest band that recorded with my Mini was Brighteye Brison who used it extensively for their latest album, prior to that it was used with Änglagård live. I have also run sounds through the filter a lot and used it as a very expensive distortionpedal for drums and bass.

Mini treatments of drums. Blanc.